Desperance: a justification
May. 2nd, 2006 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperancePerhaps I should explain. I don't know what the custom is in these parts, whether usernames are generally translated or left deliberately oblique; if I transgress, I can live with it.
Point is - surprise! - desperance wasn't my first choice, but all my early darlings (marron, homeward_angel, etc) were taken. So I fell on desperance with cries of relief, when it came up clear. It is apparently not unique as a word (I googled, and there's a whole network out there), but even so I did make it up, and that 'way back about ten years ago, before the internet was quite the thing it is.
The original, of course, is not desperance, it's D'Espérance, and in Chazworld it's a house. And a metaphor, necessarily: what house is not? But D'Espérance is a great and a special house, remote and strange and potent, and it does sort of stand for England. Or an experience of England. I have in mind to write a story-sequence that tells the history of this land throughout the twentieth century, via the medium of this house and its uses, its populations, its effects. The first of these long stories, 'The Keys to D'Espérance', has been published by Subterranean Press as a chapbook, and is still available; or you can read it online at Infinity Plus, here. It's set just after the First World War, and whether it's a ghost story might be a matter for debate, but it is certainly a story full of ghosts.
Oh, and while I'm in explaining mode (I know, I know: never apologise, never explain. But I do habitually do both), the lovely angel-icon I'm using for these posts is taken from the cover of a novel, 'Dispossession'. My favourite commissioning experience: editor phones up and asks what I want to write next, and I talk about a man with amnesia who has to investigate his own life, to find out why he's changed his job and his girlfriend and his whole moral stance during the months that he can't remember. She asks if there's anything supernatural in the story; I detect a tone of disappointment, and ask if she would like it better if there were. She says yes, so I ask how she feels about angels. Love 'em, she says. Fallen angels? I enquire. Sexy, she says. So okay, I say, it's about amnesia and a fallen angel; and she commissions it there and then. Ah, if only it were always like that...
So then all I had to do was write the book, to find out what the story was. The fallen angel turned out to be Luke (see pic), whom I loved so much I brought him back in a short story, "Luke, Homeward Angel", published in 'Taverns of the Dead', a fabulous anthology of bar stories edited by Kealan Patrick Burke and published by Cemetery Dance. Which is, of course, why I fancied homeward_angel for my username, and was sorry not to get it. But I'm sticking with the icon, none the less.
Point is - surprise! - desperance wasn't my first choice, but all my early darlings (marron, homeward_angel, etc) were taken. So I fell on desperance with cries of relief, when it came up clear. It is apparently not unique as a word (I googled, and there's a whole network out there), but even so I did make it up, and that 'way back about ten years ago, before the internet was quite the thing it is.
The original, of course, is not desperance, it's D'Espérance, and in Chazworld it's a house. And a metaphor, necessarily: what house is not? But D'Espérance is a great and a special house, remote and strange and potent, and it does sort of stand for England. Or an experience of England. I have in mind to write a story-sequence that tells the history of this land throughout the twentieth century, via the medium of this house and its uses, its populations, its effects. The first of these long stories, 'The Keys to D'Espérance', has been published by Subterranean Press as a chapbook, and is still available; or you can read it online at Infinity Plus, here. It's set just after the First World War, and whether it's a ghost story might be a matter for debate, but it is certainly a story full of ghosts.
Oh, and while I'm in explaining mode (I know, I know: never apologise, never explain. But I do habitually do both), the lovely angel-icon I'm using for these posts is taken from the cover of a novel, 'Dispossession'. My favourite commissioning experience: editor phones up and asks what I want to write next, and I talk about a man with amnesia who has to investigate his own life, to find out why he's changed his job and his girlfriend and his whole moral stance during the months that he can't remember. She asks if there's anything supernatural in the story; I detect a tone of disappointment, and ask if she would like it better if there were. She says yes, so I ask how she feels about angels. Love 'em, she says. Fallen angels? I enquire. Sexy, she says. So okay, I say, it's about amnesia and a fallen angel; and she commissions it there and then. Ah, if only it were always like that...
So then all I had to do was write the book, to find out what the story was. The fallen angel turned out to be Luke (see pic), whom I loved so much I brought him back in a short story, "Luke, Homeward Angel", published in 'Taverns of the Dead', a fabulous anthology of bar stories edited by Kealan Patrick Burke and published by Cemetery Dance. Which is, of course, why I fancied homeward_angel for my username, and was sorry not to get it. But I'm sticking with the icon, none the less.